Essay: Key Impacts of Sea Level Rise and Vulnerable Small Islands

This essay delves into the critical impacts of sea level rise on small islands, focusing on the physical and socioeconomic consequences. It highlights the continuous rise in sea levels, leading to increased flooding, erosion, and the potential disappearance of low-lying islands. The essay analyzes the vulnerability of these islands, considering factors such as limited land area, high population density, and reliance on coastal ecosystems. It evaluates the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) to understand the shared characteristics that make these islands susceptible to climate change. The essay also explores how sea level rise exacerbates existing challenges, including freshwater scarcity, increased disease transmission, and damage to vital infrastructure. By examining these multifaceted impacts, the essay underscores the urgent need for adaptation strategies and mitigation efforts to protect the well-being of small island communities.

Essay

Table of Contents
Topic: Key Impacts on Sea Level Rise on the Small Island............................................................1
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................5

Topic: Key Impacts on Sea Level Rise on the Small Island
Sea-level rise highly impacts on entire coastal areas with different-different extents. It
indicates a major ongoing change of climate at global level, especially for small island states. It
has been estimated that level of sea rises continuously with constant annual rate of about 0.05 m
(Latai‐Niusulu, Binns and Nel, 2020). The physical impact of such rise results is disappearing of
the low-lying islands; submerging and increasing flood conditions on coastal land; increased
erosion; and so on. However, climatic change and socio-environmental implications are
uncertain, but vulnerability of low-lying island states towards hazardous events, is more likely to
increase significantly. In this regard, considering the uncertainty of global warming and climatic
changes as well as its implications, a report is being prepared, to analyse vulnerability of small
islands due to natural hazards especially, rise in levels. For this purpose, IPCC Third Assessment
Report (TAR) is critically evaluated under present essay, which entails similarities shared by
small islands that reduces resilience towards climatic variability of them.
A rise in the sea-level continuously on its own, indicates that people are experience more
frequent and extreme sea-level events, which is rise above the estimated fixed reference point.
However, variation about the mean doesn’t change, but frequency of this extreme events has
increased various times, even for modest changes within mean sea level (Hafezi and et. al.,
2020). Over the twenty-first century, it has estimated that sea-level events extremely have risen
by near about 0.5 m, where most of the locations of islands of Australia has good tidal records,
from last thirty years. But due to last few years, sea-level rise is more likely to increase with high
frequency especially in the areas of Brisbane Sydney, Bass Strait and more. Furthermore, as
tropical cyclones have become more intense as per IPCC report, so, it has brought higher storm
surges with cyclones, that directly affect the extremeness of sea-level, especially in northern
parts of Australia (Hil, 2020). In addition to this, it has also analysed that tracks of such storms
may also move towards south poles from north, which may bring changes in surge and wind
events around the southern Australia.
Rise in sea-level usually leads to erosion as well as causes shoreline for retreating landwards
or shoreline recession, around sea areas including sandy coasts (McGregor and YERBURY,
2019). It has estimated that around 70% of beaches of entire are eroding, where less than ten
percent are extending seawards. So, it has indicated that shoreline recession is happened with
100 times more rate then rise in amount of sea-level. So, it equates that around 50 m erosion of
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landward is 0.5 m for a sea-level (Klöck and Nunn, 2019). Erosion of such magnitude also have
significant impact especially on low-lying island, in terms of land tenure, coastal ecosystems,
infrastructure and more. Low-lying islands as comparatively are more vulnerable to natural
hazards or rise in sea-level rise. They have low profile that exposes them towards flooding from
the higher sea levels. Along with this, as low lying islands also cover the small area, therefore,
there has been little opportunity for the communities for retreating during face of rising sea
levels (Khangaonkar, Nugraha, Xu and Balaguru, 2019). Further, small islands like coral atolls
are nature vulnerable with small climatic or environmental changes. These islands are generally
sustained via balancing between highly accumulated material eroded brings from fringing coral
reef and the sediment lost by erosion. So, it has been evaluated that rise in sea level has great
potential to disturb this balance, in terms of economic, social, cultural and environmental
consequences, especially for vulnerable coastlines within Australia and other low-lying areas of
world.
As per IPCC TAR report, it has been analysed small islands instead of located on higher
latitudes or in tropical areas, have some common characteristics, which makes them more
vulnerable towards impact of climatic changes such as sea-level rise (Sahin and et. al., 2019).
These characteristics include limited size with high density of population, proneness towards
natural calamities, less adaptive capacity, with minimal elevation above the sea level, has put the
communities living in these regions more at risks. These characteristics can be termed in
physical as well as socio-economic one, where even a small shift in patters of precipitation or sea
level, put huge impact on population, especially due to reduce in availability of freshwater
(Carvalho and Wang, 2019). Along with this, states at small islands are also depend of coastal
ecosystem like coral reeds, mangroves and more, for revenue from tourism and household
income. Therefore, rise in sea level create threats in terms of increasing intensity of storm, ocean
acidification, flooding and more, that results in decreasing tourism over small islands which put
negative impact on population on their household income.
The vulnerability of states that lies on small island area towards physical impacts of changes
in climate is exacerbated, due to various socioeconomic stressors (Khangaonkar, Nugraha, Xu
and Balaguru, 2019). It includes high growth of population growth with high densities, such as,
strain water resources via groundwater over-pumping, excessive damming as well as pollution,
including additional stress on infrastructure, settlements of coastal, disposable facilities of
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wastages and more. while over-development of the coastal infrastructure such as groins,
seawalls, causeways and so on, results in increasing erosion of land, due to interference with
natural patterns of flow of sediment flows which are majorly intended for preventing erosion and
preserving structure of island structure. It has been analysed from these mentioned observations
that rise in sea-level rise has led to reduces size of island, especially within Pacific regions
(Klöck and Nunn, 2019). Along with this, few islands of other regions of world are
morphologically resilient, which are expected to highly persist. Therefore, infrastructure of
islands is tended to predominate within coastal locations. As most of the population of Caribbean
and Pacific islands is living nearby coastal areas, within less than 1.5 km of shore (Sahin and et.
al., 2019). Therefore, almost without any exception, most of the international airports, Indian
Ocean. In this regard, rise in sea-level has exacerbated he inundation, erosion as well as other
coastal hazards, which highly threaten the vital infrastructure, facilities and settlements
(McGregor and YERBURY, 2019). Henceforth, all these factors compromise highly the well-
being at socio-economic level of small island states and communities living over there.
Further, a strong evidence has been evaluated that within most of the climate change
scenarios, scarcity of freshwater is one of the biggest problem faced by communities of small
island states. Most of them have only limited supply of water supply, where water resources in
such islands are more vulnerable towards future changes, including rainfall distribution. There
are many islands located in Caribbean which are likely to experience the stress of increased
scarcity of water, due to climate change (Hil, 2020). Considering the SRES scenario i.e. Special
Report on Emissions Scenarios, decrease in rainfall within summer season is projected for such
region, therefore, it is unlikely to say that demand of water would only be met during the period
of low rainfall. Therefore, increased rainfall in the season of winter is not so likely to
compensate, because of shortage of storage, including high runoff due to storms. Till 2050, it has
been estimated that within Pacific region, over 10% decrease in average rainfall may lead to
decrease in 20% of freshwater sources. In this regard, reduction in rainfall is coupled with rise in
sea-level rise, will compound this increasing threat (Hafezi and et. al., 2020). Away from this, a
concern is also growing towards climate change at global level, that it is likely to put adverse
impact on well-being state and health of public. Since many of the small islands are located
within in tropical zones or sub-tropical ones where weather and climatic conditions are already
conducive towards disease transmission like malaria, dengue, schistosomiasis, filariasis, water
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and food borne diseases (Latai‐Niusulu, Binns and Nel, 2020). Therefore, it highly put severe
impact and create vulnerability of communities living at coastal areas or within small island
cities. Along with this, climate-sensitive diseases such as acute respiratory infections, asthma,
diarrhoeal diseases, skin diseases and heat stress, are considered to be vulnerable for
communities due to changes in climate and rise in sea-level.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Carvalho, K. S. and Wang, S., 2019. Characterizing the Indian Ocean sea level changes and
potential coastal flooding impacts under global warming. Journal of hydrology. 569.
pp.373-386.
Hafezi, M. and et. al., 2020. Adaptation strategies for coral reef ecosystems in Small Island
Developing States: Integrated modelling of local pressures and long-term climate
changes. Journal of Cleaner Production. 253. p.119864.
Hil, G., 2020. Better management through measurement: Integrating archaeological site features
into a GIS-based erosion and sea level rise impact assessment—Blueskin Bay, New
Zealand. The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology. 15(1). pp.104-126.
Khangaonkar, T., Nugraha, A., Xu, W. and Balaguru, K., 2019. Salish Sea Response to Global
Climate Change, Sea Level Rise, and Future Nutrient Loads. Journal of Geophysical
Research: Oceans. 124(6). pp.3876-3904.
Klöck, C. and Nunn, P. D., 2019. Adaptation to climate change in small island developing states:
A systematic literature review of academic research. The Journal of Environment &
Development. 28(2). pp.196-218.
Latai‐Niusulu, A., Binns, T. and Nel, E., 2020. Climate change and community resilience in
Samoa. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. 41(1). pp.40-60.
McGregor, I. and YERBURY, H., 2019. Politics of rising tides: Governments and
nongovernmental organizations in Small-Island Developing States. Climate change and
ocean governance: Politics and policy for threatened seas, pp.118-132.
Sahin, O. and et. al., 2019. Spatial Bayesian Network for predicting sea level rise induced coastal
erosion in a small Pacific Island. Journal of environmental management. 238. pp.341-
351.
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